Because of the rise in virus and worm attacks in computer operations, and the trend of these worms propagating into corporate networks, there are industry efforts to require evaluation of a device before allowing that device to connect to a protected network. These efforts have manifested themselves in multiple standards based and proprietary solutions for measuring various attributes of devices, making policy decisions regarding allowing connection of such devices, and providing acknowledgement of allowances, such as in returning a token back to a connection point to indicate whether a device is allowed on the network and which resources should be accessible on that network. These issues are of particular interest to corporate IT departments in ensuring that unauthorized or incompliant devices are prevented from accessing the corporate network.
However, in conventional systems it may not be clear what the current environment is with regard to connection security for a device. If a connection security environment appears to be unavailable, it may not be apparent what the reason for the unavailability is. Because of these uncertainties regarding the environment, there may be difficulty in determining what actions should or should not be allowed with regard to the device.